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Jürgen Riedel

Bio

Jürgen Riedel holds a master's degree in Theoretical Physics from the Christian-Albrechts University, Kiel, Germany. Since the mid 1990's he started a career as a software developer, business analyst, and IT trainer, which led him to work in Europe as well the Americas, specializing in the private banking financial area and Business Intelligence.

He also ventured into the field of education and developed a program to utilize robotics to boost the learning potential of students, which he applied in schools in the Bahamas as well as in Germany.

He is currently pursuing his PhD in Theoretical Physics at the Jacobs University, Bremen, Germany in collaboration with the research training group Models of Gravity, Germany. His research interests are classical field theory, non-topological solitons, and black holes.

Jürgen is fascinated with the idea of emergence and how complexity arises from simple rules and constrains. He seeks to learn more about this fascinating topic.

A system has the property of universality if it can emulate the behavior of any other system given the right initial condition. Following this idea, one can start by identifying various localized structures and then using these structures as components to build up larger structures as needed. To show that a system is universal, one may try to find different possible encodings of certain structures and use those to construct the behavior of others.

For example, one can investigate if an ECA rule A can reproduce an ECA with rule B. The main idea in doing so is to encode one cell of rule A into n-blocks of cells following rule B. With this concept, one can show that that rule 45 ends up being able to emulate rule 90. But, in contrast, this is not generally possible. At least with blocks up to length 25, rule 30, for example, is not able to emulate any other rules.

The focus of the project will be in studying rule spaces other than ECAs that were studied in the NKS book. If one finds a rule that can emulate many other rules, this would suggest that this rule is a candidate for computational to universality.